The OSPT Alliance, a vendor group that seeks to challenge of dominance Mifare in contactless transit ticketing, released a second version of its “mobile guidelines” Thursday, which it said would help transit authorities and transit operators to introduce mobile ticketing on NFC phones.
The guidelines follow the long-overdue release in late March by vendors in the Mifare4Mobile industry group of the 2.0 version of their specifications to enable Mifare cards on NFC phones.
There are other challenges standing in the way of rollouts of mobile NFC transit ticketing–especially problems trying to convince transit authorities and operators of the business case for mobile NFC. But the vendor groups hope their new specifications and guidelines will provide a boost to prospects for eventual commercial launches.
The new specs and guidelines are needed to enable trusted service managers or other parties to add and manage applications and tickets on secure elements in NFC phones.
In particular, the second version of Mifare4Mobile has been much anticipated, since Mifare is the technology used in roughly three-quarters of contactless transit fare collection systems worldwide.
Before the industry group released the new specs, managing Mifare on an NFC SIM or other secure element was even more difficult. With the earlier Mifare4Mobile 1.01 specs, a service provider could only put a single Mifare Classic “virtual card” on a secure element, and it was difficult to manage it there. Moreover, there was no interoperability among vendors.
The 2.0 version of the specifications are designed to allow for multiple Mifare mobile cards on SIMs or other secure elements, better management of the Mifare services over the air by various TSMs and enabling service providers to introduce ticketing with more secure Mifare DESFire.
The Mifare services on the secure element are not considered applets, as with EMV payment applications, but “virtual cards,” with applets apparently running on top. This has been another the issues vendors have faced in building an ecosystem to dynamically manage Mifare services on NFC phones.
Other Technical Challenges
But there are other technical challenges to enabling transit ticketing on NFC devices, despite the large infrastructure of readers already in place in contactless fare-collection systems worldwide, especially in Europe and Asia. Among the problems are making sure NFC phones with different antenna configurations properly couple, or communicate, with this large base of legacy terminals onboard buses and trams and at gates leading to subway and other trains.
There have also been questions about the speed of transactions, most notably from Transport for London, which contends it cannot get near the 500 millisecond transaction times it needs for passengers passing through its fast-paced gates leading to the London Underground.
But this relates to EMV applications on SIMs and other secure elements that the transit authority’s consultants tested with NFC phones, not closed-loop transit applications. These are expected to be faster.
Transport for London is expanding open-loop payment to the London Underground and other modes of transit it oversees, having launched the service on 8,500 buses late last year–enabling riders to tap their contactless debit and credit bank cards to pay fares.
Observers point out that despite a popular NFC trial it participated in five years ago, Transport for London has little interest in dealing with mobile NFC for now–its hands are full trying to meet a year-end deadline to expand open-loop payment to the other modes and to bring its sophisticated back-office authorization system online.
NXP Semiconductors, owner of Mifare, during a recent presentation, could only point to two possible rollouts of mobile NFC transit ticketing using Mifare, in Bangkok and Dubai, though it’s unclear the rollout plans for service providers in these markets.
The largest rollout to date is in South Korea with the T-money scheme, which uses a Java-based application. Most others are pilots. The Mobile Suica service in Japan does not use standard NFC.
Business Case Concerns
The technical challenges aside, a greater barrier to rolling out of mobile NFC transit ticketing has been difficulty transit authorities, which are often heavily subsidized by governments, have faced in finding a prospective return on investment for introducing mobile NFC.
“It’s difficult to associate additional direct revenues when you migrate to mobile NFC,” acknowledged Steve Bryant, UK-based head of product, NFC transport and ticketing, at France Telecom-Orange Group, speaking at a recent conference.
And cost savings from lower card issuing and cash-handling costs likely wouldn’t cover extra costs rolling out NFC, including paying for application development and TSM fees and costs for training staff and promoting the new service, he said. In addition, the prospect for increased use of transit services by customers once agencies put ticketing on mobile phones is difficult to prove.
The key would lie in finding additional revenue sources for transport operators that mobile NFC would offer, such as giving them a “direct relationship” with their customers and using customer data analysis, including unique data transit agencies would have on the location of customers, combined with geo-location technologies of the mobile device, he said.
Transit operators could use the data to sell more of their own services and those of advertisers.
“My belief is, if we’re going to make these business cases work properly, we have to start using this,” Bryant said. “It will offer direct opportunities for the transport operators.”
Positioning Versus Mifare
But monetizing data is down the road. Until then, backers of the Mifare4Mobile and OSPT groups, which include some of the same members, will try to convince transport agencies to move on NFC by reducing card and ticket issuing costs and increasing convenience of customers, who would be able to buy and download tickets over the air, check their journeys and stored-value balances on their handset screens.
OSPT will have a more difficult task, since its proposed new transit ticketing technology has yet to be launched anywhere, and so there is no infrastructure of terminals.
Announced more than three years ago by chip vendors Infineon Technologies and Inside Secure, along with smart card companies Oberthur Technologies and Giesecke & Devrient, OSPT, short for Open Standard for Public Transport, last fall released its version two specifications for its Cipurse security protocol.
This is the protocol that would be used to secure transit passes, pay-as-you-go tickets and single rides on cards and on secure elements in NFC phones. The protocol is based on international standards, notes the group.
Samsung Semiconductor, part of Samsung Electronics, joined the alliance earlier this year. Like Inside, Samsung is believed not to be able to get a license for Mifare. Infineon, which developed the Cipurse technology, only has a grandfathered license for Mifare Classic–which, while still widely used, has been cracked.
Representatives of the group seem loath to mention Mifare by name–instead referring to the rival protocol as “proprietary solutions on the market today.”
Cipurse doesn’t require a separate platform for TSMs to manage applets for any secure element, OSPT said, in a reference to Mifare4Mobile.
“Our target was to not change any ecosystem requirements,” Jörg Suchy, associate director, smart card and NFC business development, for Samsung Semiconductor Europe and chairman of OSPT’s mobile working group, told NFC Times.
That means existing TSM platforms that work with EMV payment applets could also install the Java-based Cipurse applets on secure elements, he said.
OSPT Yet Not Gaining Ground
But it remains to be seen whether there is market demand for a Mifare alternative. So far, no global transit ticketing systems integrator has joined OSPT, and no transit operator or authority is believed to have awarded a bid to use the technology. At least one transit agency in Latin America and one in Spain, in Barcelona, are considering Cipurse.
OSPT executive director Laurent Cremer told NFC Times that he expects a Cipurse pilot to launch by the end of the year, and he contends the scheme is getting more interest from local systems integrators, including those in Brazil, Turkey, as well as in Asia. “They see OSPT as a real opportunity to differentiate from the global ones.”
Among the differentiators is price and not having to rely on a single supplier, he added.
It’s not clear, however, if Cipurse would be any cheaper than the more secure versions of Mifare. Transit authorities and operators that want to move off of security-challenged Mifare Classic can choose either Mifare DESFire or Mifare Plus.
While most transit officials that upgrade to more secure Mifare appear to be choosing DESFire, such as Transport for London for its closed-loop Oyster scheme, transit authorities that want to move off of Classic gradually, but stay with Mifare are choosing Mifare Plus, which is backward compatible with Classic. Among transit officials that have done so are those in Russia, with the large St. Petersburg and Moscow transit systems moving to Plus.
M4M 2.0: Some Limitations Remain
And NXP Semiconductors, has opened up its licensing of Mifare in recent years, including to two founding OSPT members, Oberthur and Giesecke & Devrient. It means they could use their regular chip suppliers to produce NFC-enabled SIM cards supporting mainly high-end versions of Mifare.
Both smart card vendors are part of Mifare4Mobile industry group, along with Gemalto and chip maker STMicroelectronics, which is also a Mifare licensee. NXP, of course, is a member of the group.
Mifare technology, which was designed for cards and which will soon mark its 20th anniversary, is not a natural fit for mobile, noted Orange’s Bryant at the recent NFCP Global Summit conference in London.
But he welcomed the updated Mifare4Mobile specifications, which include APIs for TSMs and wallet providers.
It still might be difficult for users to have multiple Mifare services running in their mobile wallets at the same time, such as a transit ticketing and stadium access control service. The terminals might not know which mobile Mifare card to address.
“The main problem for Mifare is user experience,” Ahmad Saif, CTO of France-based Dejamobile, a developer of NFC-enabled applications and services, told NFC Times. “Today, if you have two Mifare services, you have to switch from them manually. You cannot have multiple Mifare application activated at one time.”
A representative of NXP told NFC Times that if the applications and terminals support DESFire, users would be able to run more than one Mifare service simultaneously.
It’s not clear whether Mifare4Mobile 2.0 supports Mifare Plus yet. A recent presentation by NXP said Mifare4Mobile was only “ready” for Plus.
The Mifare4Mobile group has missed more than one deadline for releasing the 2.0 specs. They were promised for 2012 and vendors Gemalto and NXP had worked on the new specs before the industry group was formed.
Winston Yeo, vice president for mobile financial services at France-based Gemalto, which is a key backer of Mifare for NFC phones, acknowledged it was a “challenge” to get the 2.0 specs out, because the Mifare4Mobile group had to “consider the different aspects” of making the technology interoperable across various TSMs, secure element providers and app developers.
“So you won’t be implementing, and half way, (you have to revise) the specs again,” he said. “Hopefully we will reduce that cycle. Right now, (it) is execution and implementation.”
Orange’s Bryant noted that the wait for the Mifare4Mobile 2.0 specs was a long one. And while transit authorities and others interested in introducing mobile transit ticketing were waiting, they were “not evolving toward another solution, OSPT or whether that’s generic Java or Calypso or whatever that might be,” he said, mentioning the separate Calyso transit protocol. “So, it’s muddied the water from the transport and mobile operator point of view.”
He added, however, that backers of mobile NFC ticketing haven’t lost much ground during the wait because transit authorities have not been ready to move on mobile NFC. NT